Bacon's DictionaryAppendices

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The exhibits and miniatures of which are found in this section, are designed to assist the serious student and reader in following the path of the Authorship Controvesy that has been so laboriously persued by many authors and researchers during its commence.

These exhibits have been placed here as not to interrupt the flow of reading in the Baconian Dictionary sections, being a finding list of Bacon’s works, his history, his thoughts and his aims, which are a subject of study and discussion.

Elizabethan London

Below the great bridge of London, one of the wonders of Europe, we see this shipping crowding the river in the maps and views of London belonging to the reign of Queen Elizabeth. The Tower and the bridge were the city’s defences against attack by water. Near the Tower was the Custom House, where peaceful commerce paid its dues; and between the Custom House and the bridge was the great wharf of Billingsgate, where goods were landed for distribution. Near the centre of the bridge was a drawbridge, which admitted vessels to another great wharf, Queenhithe, at a point midway between London Bridge and Blackfriars. Between the bridge and Queenhithe was the Steelyard, the domain of the merchants of the Hanseatic League. Along the river front were numerous other wharves, where barges and lighters unloaded goods which they brought from the ships in the road, or from the upper reaches of the Thames. For the river was the great highway of London. It answered the needs of commerce, and it furnished the chief means of transit. The passenger traffic of Elizabethan London was carried on principally by means of rowing-boats. A passenger landed at the point nearest to his destination, and then walked; or a servant waited for him with a saddle-horse. The streets were too narrow for coaches, except in two or three main arteries. The characteristic of present-day London, at which all foreigners most marvel, is the amount of traffic in the streets. In Elizabethan London this characteristic existed in the chief highway the Thames. The passenger-boats were generally described as “wherries,” and they were likened by Elizabethan travellers to the gondolas of Venice; for instance, by Coryat, in his Crudities, who thought the playhouses of Venice very beggarly compared with those of London, but admired the gondoliers, because they were “altogether as swift as our rowers about London.”

The maps of the period reveal the extraordinary number of “stairs” for landing passengers along both banks of the river, besides the numerous wharves for goods. John Stow, the author of the Survey of London, published first in 1598, and again in a second edition in 1603, describes the traffic on the river. “By the Thames,” he says, “all kinds of merchandise be easily conveyed to London, the principal storehouse and staple of all commodities within this realm. So that, omitting to speak of great ships and other vessels of burthen, there pertaineth to the cities of London, Westminster, and borough of Southwark, above the number, as is supposed, of 2,000 wherries and other small boats, whereby 3,000 poor men at the least be set on work and maintained.” Many of these Watermen were old sailors, who had sailed and fought under Drake. The Armada deliverance was recalled by Drake’s ship, which lay in the river below the bridge. The voyage of the Earl of Essex to Spain, the expeditions to Ireland and to the Low Countries, formed the staple of the gossip of these old sailors who found employment in the chief means of locomotion in Elizabethan London. There was only the single bridge, but there were several ferries. The principal ferry was from Blackfriars and the Fleet river to a point opposite on the Surrey side, called Paris Garden stairs nearly in a line with the present Blackfriars Bridge. At Westminster was another, from the Horseferry Road to a point a little west of Lambeth Palace almost in the line of the present Lambeth Bridge. The river was fordable at low tide at this point; horses crossed here whence the name Horseferry and possibly other cattle, when the tide was unusually low. The sea is the home of piety. Coast towns, ports, and havens, reached after voyages of peril, are invariably notable for their places of worship, and for customs which speak touchingly like the blessing of fishermen’s nets, for instance of lives spent in uncertainty and danger. Thus, the leading characteristic of Elizabethan London being its association with the sea and its dependence on the river, we find that its next most striking characteristic was the extraordinary number of churches it contained.

The great cathedral predominated more pronouncedly than its modern successor. From the hill on which it was based it reared its vast bulk; its great spire ascended the heavens, and the multitude of church towers and spires and belfries throughout the city seemed to follow it. The houses were small, the streets were narrow; but to envisage the city from the river, or from the Surrey side, was to have the eye led upwards from point to point to the summit of St. Paul’s. The dignity and piety of London were thus expressed, in contradiction to human foibles and failings so conspicuous in Elizabethan drama. The spire of St. Paul’s was destroyed by lightning early in the reign of Elizabeth; and the historian may see much significance in the fact that it was not rebuilt, even in thanksgiving and praise for the deliverance from the Great Armada. The piety of London dwindled until it flamed forth anew in the time of the Puritan revolt. The bridge was carried on nineteen arches. It had a defensive gate at the Southwark end, and another gateway at the northern end. In the centre was a beautiful chapel, dedicated to Thomas a Becket, and known as St. Thomas of the Bridge. Houses were built on the bridge, mostly shops with overhanging signs, as in the streets of the city. Booksellers and haberdashers predominated, but other trades were carried on also. After the chapel, the most conspicuous feature of the bridge was Nonesuch House, so called to express the wonder that it was constructed in Holland entirely of wood, brought over the water piece by piece, and put together on the bridge by dovetailing and pegs, without the use of a single metal nail.

Adjoining the northern gateway was an engine for raising water by means of a great wheel operated by the tide. Near the Southwark end were corn-mills, worked on the same principle, below the last two arches of the bridge. The gateway at the Southwark end, so well shown in Visscher’s view of London, was finished in 1579, and the traitors’ heads, which formerly surmounted a tower by the drawbridge, were transferred to it. Travellers from the south received this grim salutation as they approached the bridge, which led into the city; and when they glanced across the river, the Tower frowned upon them, and the Traitors’ Gateway, like teeth in an open mouth, deepened the effect of warning and menace. But these terrors loomed darkling in the background for the most part. They belonged rather to the time when the Sovereign’s palaces at Westminster and at the Tower seemed to hold London in a grip. The palace at Westminster now languished in desuetude; the Tower was a State prison, and with some ironical intent, perhaps also the abode of the royal beasts, lions, tigers, leopards, and other captives. The Queen passed in her royal barge down the river with ceremonious pageantry from her palace of Whitehall; the drawbridge raised, the floating court passed the Tower as with lofty indifference on its way to Placentia, her Majesty’s palace at Greenwich. Out of the silence of history a record speaks like a voice, and tells us that here, in 1594, Shaksper and his fellows performed at least two comedies or interludes before her Majesty, and we know even the amounts that were paid them for their services.

In the Survey of John Stow we have three separable elements: the archaeology and history of London, Stow’s youthful recollections of London in the time of Henry the Eighth, and Stow’s description of the great change which came over London after the dissolution of the religious houses, and continued in process throughout his lifetime. The mediaeval conditions were not remote. He could remember when London was clearly denned by the wall, like a girdle, of which the Tower was the knot. No heroic change had befallen; the wall had not been cast down into its accompanying fosse to form a ring-street, as was done when Vienna was transformed from the mediaeval state. London had simply filled up the ditch with its refuse; its buildings had simply swarmed over the wall and across the dike; shapeless and haphazard suburbs had grown up, till the surrounding villages became connected with the city. Even more grievous, in the estimation of Stow, was the change which he had witnessed within the city itself. The feudal lords had departed, and built themselves mansions outside the city. The precincts of the dissolved religious establishments had been converted into residential quarters, and a large proportion of the old monastic gardens had been built upon. The outlines of society had become blurred. Formerly, the noble, the priest, and the citizen were the defined social strata. Around each of these was grouped the rest of the social units in positions of dependence. A new type of denizen had arisen, belonging to none of the old categories the typical Elizabethan Londoner.

The outward aspect of Elizabethan London reflected this social change. On the south of the city, along the line of Thames Street, the wall had entirely disappeared. On the east and west it was in decay, and was becoming absorbed in fresh buildings. Only on the north side of the city, where it had been re-edified as late as 1474, did the wall suggest its uses for defence. In the map of Agas, executed early in the reign of Elizabeth, this portion of the wall, with its defensive towers and bastions, appears singularly well preserved. Thus the condition of the wall suggested the passing of the old and the coming of the new order. The gates which formerly defended the city, where the chief roadways pierced the wall, still remained as monuments, and they were admirably adapted to the purpose of civic pageantry and ceremonial shows. Indeed, the gateway on the Oxford road was rebuilt in 1586, and called Newgate, “from the newness thereof,” and it was the “fairest” of all the gates of London. It is reckoned that this was the year that Shaksper came to London from Stratford-on-Avon; and the assumption is generally allowed that he entered the city by Newgate, which would be his direct road. A new gate, of an artistic and ornamental character, set in the ancient wall, was a sign and a symbol of the new conditions in London, of which Shaksper himself was destined to become the chief result. Some of the City Guilds are entitled to be called “learned societies” as the Apothecaries, the Parish Clerks, the Stationers, and the Surgeons. By the learned societies of London, were voluntary bodies existing with or without royal patronage, but relying wholly for support on the contributions of their members, which have taken upon themselves the promotion of knowledge in one or more of its branches. The earliest which can be traced is that Society of Antiquaries which was founded in 1572, the fourteenth year of Queen Elizabeth, at the house of Sir Robert Cotton, under the presidency of Archbishop Parker. It counted among its members Lancelot Andrewes, Bishop of Winchester, William Camden, Sir William Dethicke, Garter, William Lambarde, James Ley, Earl of Marlborough, John Stow, Mr. Justice Whitelock, and other antiquaries of distinction. It is said that James I. became alarmed for the arcana of his Government and, as some thought, for the established Church, and accordingly put an end to the existence of the society in 1604. (Ordish). 1